Blog Post Thursday: Small Town Life and Auction Adventures

It's blog post Thursday, and here I am, fashionably late to my own weekly tradition. I've been posting these a little erratically lately because, well, life has been busy. But priorities are good, right? I like to think I have good priorities – like paying consignors before writing blog posts. Except today. Well, now that I wrote that, I had to stop mid-sentence to print a bank statement. See what I mean about priorities?

This past February was the first time I had to send people home for a few days because we simply didn't have anything to do. We had auctions booked, but couldn't work on them yet. It was one of those surreal moments in business – having work lined up but nothing immediate to tackle. Fast forward to today, and we have auctions booked until the end of September, yet I feel like we need more hours in the day. Sure wish the fairies would come and wave their magic wands to get us all caught up. I've been waiting for those fairies for years now, but they must be too busy helping other folks or maybe they're just really hard to book during busy season.

I've been saying lately that I love living in Southern Illinois, and I think it's a good thing to love where you're living. I know when I was a teenager, I was ready to move far away and never come back. Classic small-town kid syndrome – the grass is always greener somewhere with more traffic lights and fewer people who know your business. But I never left, and honestly, I don't know where else I'd want to live.

Speaking of Southern Illinois charm, we're selling a house in Rosiclare, and I asked the seller what the address was. "I don't know," was his reply, and he felt a little silly since he had grown up in the house. It happens – we'll get it figured out. So off to the courthouse I went, got a copy of the property card and a copy of the taxes, walked out to the vehicle, sat down, and looked. I laughed out loud: "Mrs. Atkinson, Rosiclare, IL" – no address, just name and town. That's small-town record-keeping for you.

I told someone that story, and they said their brother had once mailed their mother a letter with the return address filled in properly and then addressed simply to "Mom, Joppa, IL." That letter made it to his mom. I love that about small towns – the postal service becomes part detective, part mind reader, and somehow it all works out.

The small-town experience doesn't stop at mysterious addresses. I called a small town here in Southern Illinois recently to ask about zoning for a house. The zoning guy said he'd have to call me back – he was fishing. I didn't mind at all; he answered his phone, which is more than you can say for most government offices in bigger cities. There's something refreshingly honest about a public official who'll take your call from the lake and promise to get back to you once he's done trying to catch dinner.

This is the kind of place where people still know their neighbors, where the hardware store owner remembers what you bought last time, and where "rush hour" means you might hit two red lights instead of one. It's where you can still get your car fixed by someone who learned from their dad, and where the local diner serves coffee that's been brewing since the Carter administration – and somehow it's still perfect.

Yes, I did eventually use the internet to figure out that elusive Rosiclare address. Sometimes even in small-town America, you need the world wide web to solve the mystery of where exactly you live. But that's part of the charm – we're old-fashioned enough to operate on handshakes and first names, yet modern enough to Google our way out of addressing predicaments.

The beauty of small-town life isn't just in the quirky stories – though those are plentiful. It's in the rhythm of it all. The pace that allows for fishing during work hours, the trust that lets mail find its way to "Mom" without a street number, and the community that makes you feel like you belong somewhere specific on this big planet.

As I finish writing this, I can see the box truck just pulled back in, and I need to go check it out. That's small-town business too – you wear multiple hats, handle everything from property research to truck inspections, and somehow it all comes together. The fairies may not show up to wave their magic wands, but in Southern Illinois, we've got something better: neighbors who'll help you figure out your address, postal workers who deliver to "Mom," and zoning officials who'll call you back after they catch their limit.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a truck to inspect and probably seventeen other things that weren't on my priority list this morning. But hey, at least I got my blog post written – even if it's Thursday and I'm running fashionably late to my own deadline.